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Civil rights advocates urge BPS: Don’t share student info with ICE

By Shannon Dooling, WBUR ReporterJanuary 8, 2020

Shannon Dooling, WBUR Reporter

More than 100 student incident reports containing students’ personal information and produced by Boston Public Schools (BPS) officials have been made available to federal immigration authorities since 2014, according to education and civil rights advocates.

Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) and others sued the city of Boston and BPS in June 2018 after they were denied access to the records. Janelle Dempsey, an attorney with LCR, said in a statement that the newly released documents suggest alarming “collusion” between BPS and federal immigration authorities.

“BPS is creating a dangerous school-to-deportation pipeline that must be stopped immediately,” Dempsey said.

The lawsuit followed the 2016 arrest of an East Boston High School student by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The student, whom WBUR interviewed in 2018, was involved in a lunchtime argument that resulted in a school police officer filing a student incident report. The report labeled the student, who had no criminal record, as an associate of the gang MS-13.

The school officer noted in the report that the incident would “also be sent to the BRIC.” The Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) is a unit of the Boston Police Department that gathers and analyzes intelligence. The information is shared with federal law enforcement, including ICE.
The student remained in ICE detention for more than a year before being deported back to his native El Salvador.

This article was originally published on Jan. 6 by WBUR 90.9FM. The Reporter and WBUR share content through a media partnership.